If you hear [Richard Pryor's album Is It Something I Said?] and find it offensive, outrageous, gross, unbelievable, and otherwise distasteful, you are perfectly normal. You probably will have to fight with your own tastes and the social con...
SOURCE: Wollen, Peter. “Cinema's Conquistadors.” Sight and Sound 2, no. 7 (November 1992): 21-3. In the following review, Wollen characterizes 1492: Conquest of Paradise as a re-evaluation of the myth of Christopher Columbus, portraying...
[The 158-Pound Marriage] is impressively flashy in episode and style, deceptively arch, and pocked all over with little depth charges of drama that rumble up with an aching, rueful but often hilarious humor. Irving fingers a human foible li...
At heart 1900 is elegiac, and what it inscribes on its large historical canvas is a lament, in which something akin to a mourning for a lost wholeness plays a dominant role. Consider the temporal unfolding of the film: a world of childhood ...
[1941] is an overblown repetitive, cartoon-style satire that runs into the ground a good hour before it ends. Yet there are things to be prized in it…. Set in Los Angeles the week after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, 1941 jumps back an...
Lou Reed didnt seem hung up. Not on [1969 Live]. The cross dont seem his true shape. The boy on this record was riding a wave—seeming in a state of suspended joy. Longing checked in some roadhouse like Steve McQueen in Baby the Rain Must ...
In the first half of the 19th century the processes known as Industrialization and Urbanization started to transform Europe. It affected and changed every aspect of life of every citizen of every European nation. The notorious results of ...
Space Odyssey 2001 fits the definition of an epic. An epic can be defined as "a long narrative in elevated style presenting characters of high position in adventures important to the history and identity of a nation or people." Space Odysse...
Study Pack: 2 Study Guides, 3 Biographies, 2 Summaries, 2 Essays, 8 Criticisms, 1 Quotes
Robert Altman's 3 Women is such a stimulating achievement in cinematic art that it makes one rethink the whole aesthetic of motion pictures…. There is something so utterly unusual about 3 Women that its like may never materialize again, e...
SOURCE: Porter, Peter. “A Month in the City.” Spectator 287, no. 9029 (25 August 2001): 35-6. In the following review, Porter finds 30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account to be superficial and elitist, commenting that Carey focus...
[The 400 Blows is a sad, bitter] story of a child's gradual disaffection from society. The child is tough, imaginative, exuberant; the society is dull, timid, corrupt. But the film's point of view isn't sentimental…. The 400 Blows does no...
Joel has always been an easy target for his arrogance, pretentiousness, hypocrisy, and on 52nd Street he's still showing them off. He talks tough to get the Warren Zevon fans ("Big Shot") and acts out his laughable misogyny ("Stiletto"), bu...
8 1/2
8 1/2 (1963) by Federico Fellini about a man named Guido, an Italian director who has lost inspiration for his upcoming movie. He is continuingly feeling pressure from his friends, wife, mistress and producer. His only way to escap...
SOURCE: Falcon, Richard. Review of 8[frac12] Women, by Peter Greenaway. Sight and Sound 10, no. 1 (January 2000): 48–49. In the following review, Falcon offers a negative assessment of 8[frac12 Women, arguing that the film is limited by G...
A.A. Milne (1882-1956) worked as an essayist, a playwright, a poet, and an adult novelist, in addition to his important contribution as an author of juvenile books. Although he attempted to excel in all literary genres, he was master of Ch...
Study Pack: 5 Biographies, 1 Summary, 4 Criticisms, 1 Quotes
Alfred Bertram Guthrie, Jr., is best known for his writing about the American West. His three most famous novels--sometimes referred to together as a trilogy--cover the eventful decades between 1830 and 1890, vividly depicting the lives of...
Study Pack: 2 Biographies, 1 Summary, 8 Criticisms
[Yehoshua] brings to his plays a knack for structural compactness, for manipulation of character and for creating a sense of an impending turning point. All these dramatic commodities are dynamically galvanized by a dialogue that rapidly al...
Arthur Christopher Benson was one of the most prolific and popular essayists of the Edwardian period. Son of an archbishop of Canterbury, editor of the selected letters of Queen Victoria, and author of "Land of Hope and Glory," he was an u...
Study Pack: 1 Biography, 1 Summary, 10 Criticisms, 1 Quotes
The legacy of leading Australian poet A. D. Hope to world literature is unquestionable, comprising eleven books of poetry, seven collections of critical essays, and two plays. His writing, compelling in its originality and passion, and rig...
Study Pack: 1 Biography, 1 Summary, 10 Criticisms, 1 Quotes
On All Fool's Day 1919 Alfred Edgar Coppard left his job as a clerk-cost accountant at the Eagle Ironworks in Oxford to live alone in a cottage at Shepards Pit, where he began to re-create himself as A. E. Coppard, author. Although the mos...
A. G. Mojtabai opens Mundome with an image of dissolution and decay. The landscape she describes—like those of Pynchon, Barth, and Barthelme—is in the process of breaking down, losing its vitality and wearing away…. Through her initia...
A. J. Cronin was a novelist, dramatist, and nonfiction writer whose works examine moral conflicts between the individual and society as his idealistic heroes pursue justice for the common man. His moralistic novels are known by the public ...
In 1976 at Michigan State University, American and Canadian scholars and poets gathered to honor A. J. M. Smith, seventy-four-year-old doyen of Canadian letters. It is fitting that such a symposium should have been held at an American univ...
A. L. Kennedy is one of the most consistently energetic and critically acclaimed novelists to have emerged from Scotland in the closing years of the twentieth century. Since the early 1990s she has produced novels, collections of short sto...
A. M. Klein (1909-1972), journalist and lawyer, was widely regarded as one of Canada's leading poets. His novel The Second Scroll has been acclaimed by scholars and critics as a masterpiece. He contributed significantly to the emergence of...
Study Pack: 2 Biographies, 1 Summary, 6 Criticisms, 1 Quotes
A. R. Gurney is one of the few major playwrights to emerge in the 1960s and maintain a flourishing stage career four decades later. His plays continue to be performed widely Off-Broadway and in resident, summer stock, community, and academ...
Although thus far she has written only three novels, A. S. Byatt has nonetheless achieved a distinguished place as a person of letters in the last two decades. As novelist, critic, reviewer, editor, and lecturer, Byatt offers in her work a...
Study Pack: 2 Biographies, 1 Summary, 11 Criticisms, 1 Quotes
The Garden-of-Live-Flowers incident in the Alice-mythos anticipates the method of the modern detection-fan. To find the Red Queen he has learnt to go in the most unlikely direction. So now the hard-pressed writer is inclined to try a double...
SOURCE: Arthur, Paul. “Movie of the Moment: A.I.: Artificial Intelligence.” Film Comment 37, no. 4 (July-August 2001): 22-3. In the following review, Arthur perceives A.I.: Artificial Intelligence to be an unsuccessful amalgamation of S...
SOURCE: Yeats, W. B. “Irish National Drama.” In The Abbey Theatre: Interviews and Recollections, edited by E. H. Mikhail, pp. 98-100. London, United Kingdom: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1988. In the following interview, originally published i...
As an American, one is entitled to all the rights and privileges of a citizen. One can vote, hold office, drive any vehicle or own land. However, at one point in time African Americans were not entitled to these basic rights and principles ...
Study Pack: 3 Summaries, 1 Essay, 26 Criticisms, 1 Quotes
SOURCE: Dykes, Eva Beatrice. “The Romantic Climax.” In The Negro in English Romantic Thought, or, A Study of Sympathy for the Oppressed, pp. 63-103. Washington, D.C.: Associated Publishers, 1942. In the following essay, Dykes examines t...
The Jewish author and journalist Abraham Cahan (1860-1951) was a prominent Socialist leader and union organizer among Jewish immigrants in the United States. Abraham Cahan was born in Podberezhie, near Vilna, Lithuania. His father was a st...
Study Pack: 4 Biographies, 2 Summaries, 6 Criticisms
The English writer Abraham Cowley (1618-1667) was among the first to use the Pindaric ode form in English poetry. He contributed importantly to the development of the familiar essay in English. The posthumous son of a merchant, Abraham Cow...
Study Pack: 3 Biographies, 1 Summary, 8 Criticisms, 1 Quotes
Abraham Polonsky's importance as a screenwriter rests both on his body of work--one of the strongest, continuously radical political statements in commercial American film--and on his role as symbol of the oppressed Hollywood writer, drive...
Study Pack: 1 Biography, 1 Summary, 11 Criticisms, 1 Quotes
Absalom, Absalom! - William Faulkner - 1936 Introduction William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (1936) is considered by many critics and scholars to be one of the most important and influential American novels by one of the greatest au...
Study Pack: 1 Study Guide, 6 Biographies, 2 Summaries, 1 Criticism
SOURCE: "Fathers and Sons: The Norative Basis of Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel," in Papers on Language & Literature, Vol. 17, No. 4, Fall 1981, pp. 363-80. In the following excerpt, Donnelly demonstrates that in Absalom and Achitophel, Dr...
Colin MacInnes's little known trilogy of London novels comprises vividly composed fictions of the underside of London life. In City of Spades (1957), Absolute Beginners (1959), and Mr. Love and Justice (1960), autonomous fictions linked by ...
SOURCE: A review of Abundance, in Variety, Vol. 335, No. 4, May 10, 1989, p. 120. In the following negative review, the critic asserts that Abundance “is dragged down by its lack of an idea of where it's going or what it intends to accomp...
SOURCE: An introduction to The Izayoi Nikki, in Translations from Early Japanese Literature, Harvard University Press, 1951, pp. 3-51. In the following excerpt, first published in 1947, Reischauer places the Izayoi Nikki in historical conte...
SOURCE: "Dario Fo, Politics and Satire: An Introduction to Accidental Death of an Anarchist," in Theater, Vol. 10, No. 2, Spring 1979, pp. 7-11. Cowan presents a brief survey of Fo's career and the background of Accidental Death of an Anarc...
Study Pack: 1 Study Guide, 1 Biography, 1 Summary, 5 Criticisms
SOURCE: Strauss, Leo. “The Other Plays: The Acharnians.” In Socrates and Aristophanes, pp. 57-79. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1966. In the following essay, Strauss offers a detailed analysis of the Acharnians. The Acharnia...
Study Pack: 1 Study Guide, 1 Summary, 6 Criticisms
SOURCE: A review of The Acid House, in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 34, No. 3, Summer, 1997, p. 401. In the following review of The Acid House, Bush examines Welsh's use of dialect and jargon, finding such language rhythmic and poetic. A ...
SOURCE: "The Argument for Terrible Deeds," in San Francisco Review of Books, Vol. 17, No. 1, January 1992, p. 5. The following review by Randolph Vigne, a South African activist of the 1960s, praises An Act of Terror for its depiction of So...
It is when Steinbeck abandons caution [in The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights] that he contributes most to the Arthurian tradition. In the early sections on Merlin, Balin and Balan, the feud with Morgan le Fay, he is often transla...
Adalbert Stifter is the best-known nineteenth-century Austrian prose writer and is among the most highly regarded of all German and Austrian writers of the modern era. His work, along with that of such writers as Christian Dietrich Grabbe,...
Study Pack: 2 Biographies, 1 Summary, 9 Criticisms
Throughout Adam Bede the characters of Dinah Morris and Hetty Sorrell are compared and contrasted, albeit sometimes indirectly, both can, at times, represent the Madonna and the harlot. It is not always clear which woman is the harlot and w...
Study Pack: 1 Summary, 1 Essay, 15 Criticisms, 1 eBook
The political leader and Harlem Baptist minister Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. (1908-1972) was a pioneer in civil rights for black Americans. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. was born on November 29, 1908, in New Haven, Connecticut, moving with his par...
SOURCE: “Adam Mickiewicz: Poland's National Romantic Poet,” in South Atlantic Bulletin, Vol. 42, No. 4, November, 1977, pp. 103-13. In the following essay, Fagin offers an overview of Mickiewicz's literary career, observing that Mickiew...
The Scottish economist and moral philosopher Adam Smith (1723-1790) believed that in a laissez-faire economy the impulse of self-interest would work toward the public welfare. Adam Smith was born on June 5, 1723, at Kirkcaldy. His father h...
